wes_mantooth;1480016 wrote:yeah, I got warned a couple times over the years, so I went into the settings and turned the upload down to the minimum with is like 1 KB/sec I believe
This doesn't help and won't stop warning letters. You have to understand how Bittorrent works:
A .torrent file is a small file that contains a tracker URL, and a list of hashes for the pieces of files in the torrent. This is what you end up downloading from thepiratebay or whatever. The torrent sites remain "legal" because they aren't hosting anything illegal...the torrents are just pointers and checksums for the files that are shared by others in the swarm.
When you first load a torrent into a bittorrent client it:
1) reads the hashtable and gets a list of all of the files contained within the package.
2)attempts to contact the tracker contained within the torrent to get a list of available IP addresses (other bittorrent users who have the same torrent) to download it from.
(This is where peerblock/setting your upload to 1KB is worthless) Once your client has a list of IP addresses to download from,
the tracker will add you to the same list of IP addresses it just requested.
3) the client then starts trying to connect to all of those IP addresses it just received. Each IP address it successfully connects to will reply back "Yeah, i have X amount of pieces". If you check out the "peers" tab of your client, it'll show the IP address, the percentage of the torrent they have completed, as well as the number of pieces.
If you ever look at the files tab of your torrent client (if it has one) you'll notice that it downloads random chunks until the download is 100% complete. As each individual chunk completes, your torrent client will report to the swarm that you have it and it's available to others.
The client will usually say somewhere, like "4000 pieces @ 1MB", meaning the torrent is 4000MB and each "chunk" is 1MB in size.
People with all 4000 pieces are seeders. People with less than 4000 are leechers.
When you're downloading a torrent, as long as you have a single completed piece, you are sharing part of that torrent. Peerblock or setting your upload speed to 1KB is not going to help you get away from that. All the "internet police" would have to do is scrape the tracker and get a list of hosts. Then they have all of the evidence they need to take you to court for copyright infringement since they know someone from your IP address was sharing xyz at a certain time.
The tracker is also a single point of failure: if the tracker doesn't respond at all, the download will simply never start since the client can never get a list of hosts with the file. Ever load up a torrent and it sits at 0%? This is probably why.
Newer clients can operate without a tracker, but a good majority of torrent sites still rely on trackers to handle the swarm of potential sharers.
I say for the first time ever in a serious manner:
Hope this helps.
